The Fire Line by Fernanda Santos

Author:Fernanda Santos
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250054036
Publisher: Flatiron Books

NO ANSWER

Marsh called Frisby on the radio—“I want to pass on that we’re going to make our way to our escape route.”

Frisby asked, “You guys are in the black, correct?”

“Yeah, we’re picking our way through the black.” Marsh mentioned a road off the bottom of the mountain and said his crew was “going out toward the ranch.”

Cordes listened in on the conversation and deduced that Marsh and his men had in mind the Boulder Springs Ranch. That was the bombproof safety zone that had been singled out on a map after the briefing that morning. It stood at the mouth of a box canyon, east of the fire line Granite Mountain had been building. Cordes had tried to get hold of Marsh minutes earlier to talk about the changing weather, but was having problems being heard from his radio—and a backup, mounted in his truck, wasn’t programmed with the frequency he needed.

Cordes didn’t try to stop Granite Mountain. He thought they would have plenty of time to get to the ranch.

The fire had hit the first of three trigger points Cordes had set, the hill that looked like an index finger, so he instructed dispatchers to give folks in Yarnell an hour to pack up and leave. That’s how long he thought the fire would take to reach the town.

Bravo 33 looped around the fire, straining to fulfill its dual roles that afternoon—scheduling and tracing routes for air-tanker drops, and managing air-to-ground communications. Its crew told dispatchers that flames threatened six hundred structures on the north and southeast sides of Yarnell. The now erratic winds were pushing the fire all over the place.

An air attack supervisor pleaded with the Southwest Coordination Center for six more tankers, more water and chemicals to drop on the flames. The center granted one and dispatched it from Southern California, hours away, but the closest still available. Flying toward Yarnell, the tanker experienced engine trouble. It dumped its full load of two thousand gallons of retardant where none was needed, turned around, and flew back to base. Mission aborted.

In Prescott, Juliann Ashcraft enlisted her older kids to shut the windows. Powerful winds banged at their front door like an angry visitor. Rain poured. She hoped the storm would bring rain to Yarnell, too, quench that fire, and free up Andrew to come home that night. She and the kids missed him.

At 4:04 p.m., she picked up her smartphone and typed a question to Andrew: “Are you sleeping down there?”

Frisby had enrolled two drivers to help McDonough move the Granite Mountain Hotshots’ buggies over to the dirt parking lot at the Ranch House Restaurant. McDonough turned the key, started the superintendent’s truck—Marsh’s truck—and the radio crackled. He heard Marsh’s and Steed’s familiar voices. The carriers’ radios were always tuned to the crew’s frequency, which only they used.

Marsh and Steed were apart, but keeping in touch, as they had through much of the day.

Marsh had trudged across a ridge northeast of Steed and the rest of his crew, then hiked down, in the direction of the Boulder Springs Ranch.

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